In Black and White

It’s that time of year again. While Black History Month officially started a few days ago, TV programmers, Broadway producers, book publishers, and other toilers in the field of culture gave themselves a jump on black-earned dollars by starting Black History Month a couple of weeks early now—on Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, in fact.

This year, the great orator and religious-minded leader’s birthday was celebrated in the usual way. On the radio, one heard his “I Have A Dream” speech over and over again. Oprah even devoted an episode to exploring King’s historic August 28, 1963, March on Washington and its legacy of nonviolence among the Oprah-fed young.

But a brief moment of channel-surfing revealed a continued belief on the behalf of the programmers that race itself is just a unifying theme, divorced from any ideas of brilliance or talent. To that end, it was rather surreal to flip back and forth between the black-and-white newsreel footage of King marching in Selma, in Washington, in Mississippi, and Halle Berry losing her mind in “Gothika,” the first of the string of terrible movies she made following her 2001 Oscar-winning portrayal a beaten-down black woman who opens her heart to a white racist man who works in law enforcement in “Monster’s Ball.”

Berry dedicated her tear-filled Oscar acceptance speech to black women with a dream. Then she proceeded to take on as many “color blind” roles as possible. If white actresses have a short shelf life in Hollywood, most black film actresses apparently don’t even have a shelf.

Hilton Als, The New Yorker’s theatre critic, has been a staff writer since 1994. He is the author of “White Girls.”